Summary
Many of us can still recall a time when family cake tins contained a delicious variety of home-made biscuits, slices, fruit loaves and cakes baked each week by mothers, aunts and grandmothers. The contents of the tins brightened children's lunches, revived them after school, and refreshed friends and visitors at morning and afternoon teatime. Women also baked for suppers and teas at community events in response to the message 'Ladies, a plate' often printed on invitations. Cream-filled sponges, ginger kisses, lamingtons, custard squares, chocolate #65533;clairs, club sandwiches and sausage rolls were just some of the many specialties perfected by home bakers. This is a book for anyone who longs to re-create their favourite treats with over 80 easy-to-follow recipes - all of them tried, tested and true.
Alexa Johnston is a writer and independent art curator. After working for nineteen years as a curator at Auckland Art Gallery, in 2002 she was curator of the exhibition Sir Edmund Hillary: Everest and Beyond for Auckland Museum. Her first book, Sir Edmund Hillary: An Extraordinary Life - a definitive biography of the legendary New Zealand mountaineer - was a finalist in the Montana Book Awards.
An enthusiastic and accomplished baker from a young age, Alexa has published three cookbooks celebrating New Zealand's culinary history. The first Ladies, a Plate ( 2008) won a Montana Book Award, the Publishers' Association of New Zealand Award for Best Illustrated Book and was Recipe Book of the Year in the New Zealand Guild of Food Writers Culinary Quill Awards. This was followed by A Second Helping (2009) and What's For Pudding? (2011) and in 2012 a hardback collectors' edition of her baking recipes, Ladies, a Plate: The Collection (2012). For her latest book, Ladies, a Plate: Jams and Preserves, Alexa turns her attention to a once-essential branch of domestic cookery and makes a convincing case for bringing it back to the centre of our kitchen activities.
Alexa Johnston makes and tests all the recipes for her cook books - and takes all the photographs - in her home kitchen in Auckland.
www.ladiesaplate.co.nz
